Pete Carroll gets kick he deserved

This had to be a really fun week for Pete Carroll, pretending he didn’t cost his Seattle Seahawks a shot at the NFC title game. They got right to the brink, only to have their coach join the crowd of knuckleheads “icing” the placekicker too late.

You’d have thought this nonsense would have subsided by now – and you’d hope the NFL will introduce some type of legislation to prevent it from happening again.

Listen, there’s nothing wrong with “icing” a kicker, at least in principle. Call timeout, let him think a little, rattle his brain. The notion goes haywire when the kick is in the air, but wait a minute, timeout was called; that kick won’t count!

Matt Bryant, the Atlanta kicker whose 49-yard field goal won the game with 13 seconds left, couldn’t believe his good fortune. Carroll played the devious card, standing alongside the official and taking it right down to the last second before calling time. Bryant’s kick sailed wide right, and, “It was good for them to call the timeout,” he told reporters. “I’d messed up my timing a little bit.”

Then, given a mulligan, Bryant drilled it straight through the uprights.

Carroll frantically pleaded with the official, saying later that, the way he understood things, “Nobody’s going to get a chance to do that (get a practice kick).” He’s right; that shouldn’t happen. But this is on Carroll, and Miami’s Joe Philbin, and the Giants‘ Tom Coughlin, and every other coach (too many to count) who pulled this pathetic stunt in recent years. If you wait so long that the opposing team gets off a snap, you’ve shown little regard for the ethics of coaching.

Over the course of this season, a number of kickers said they actually welcome the tactic. “I’d never call that if I was coaching,” the Giants’ Lawrence Tynes told reporters. “We get to slow down, and do it again better. Why would you ever want to give someone a practice rep on anything? Would you want to practice an 8-foot pressure putt before you had to do it for real? It’s the same thing.”

And the same black mark on the NFL’s integrity. Astonishing to think that Carroll, a very bright guy, sunk so low.